Эд Горман - Fools Rush In

The rear of the shop had been built as an afterthought, a shedlike area that housed two huge refrigerated glassed-in cases to keep flowers fresh and then plants and seedlings sitting on sawhorses that had been covered with plywood.

“Have you talked to Rob?”

“Not if I can help it.”

Spritz, spritz.

Lucy said: “I did talk to David’s sister. She called me and we had coffee. I liked her very much.”

I didn’t tell her of David’s real relationship with his “sister.”

“So do I. I just wish I had some news for her.”

“A lot of the kids around town think it was Rob.”

“Or Nick.”

Spritz, spritz.

“Or Nick.”

The smell of damp earth brought back a memory of my Uncle Bob’s funeral. He’d died in Korea. When they buried him here, a light rain had given the grave dirt a particular odor. I smelled that odor here, now, with the spritzed dirt in the various plants.

“You know anything about Rob trying to get a tar baby made up?”

She nodded, still not looking at me. “Oh, yes. I heard all about it from a couple of people at the craft store. Good old Rob. God, I don’t know how I could’ve gone out with him all that time.”

I said, as carefully as possible, “I guess I never really asked you.”

“Well, then, I’m sure you will. Whatever it is.”

“I just need to know, just to keep everybody equal, where you were the night Neville and David were killed.”

Now she looked up. “Why, I was out at Neville’s cabin, killing them. I’m surprised it took you this long to ask. So do you put handcuffs on me here or do we wait until we get in your car?”

“You could’ve done it, Lucy. You know that.”

“You stupid ass,” she said, pushing me aside so she could reach another tray of seedlings. “I loved him. I was willing to destroy my father’s career because of him. Why would I kill him?”

Karen appeared in the doorway. She was irritated: “Hold it down, you two. We’ve got customers, for God’s sake.”

“Sorry,” I said.

I left Lucy alone for a few minutes.

“You told me yourself that he wanted to break it off.” I spoke in a stage whisper.

As did she. “Break it off because he thought that marrying him — and yes, that’s exactly what I had in mind — would destroy me. He didn’t think I was strong enough to handle it in the long run.”

I touched her sleeve. She jerked away. “I had to ask. I just want to know what happened.”

“What happened” — and here she pushed her beautiful face close to my unbeautiful one — “is this society is so racist it won’t even let you marry the person you love. That’s what happened.” She pulled back. Visibly forced herself to calm down. “If we’d just been two white people, we could have had a wonderful life together. But David was right. That would never happen. Not in this country, anyway. No matter where we went, somebody would get ugly either with us or the kids we had. That’s what happened. Somebody just couldn’t stand the idea that David and I were together. And so they killed him.”

Her voice had steadily risen.

Karen was in the doorway again: “Dammit, you two!”

I waved at her. And left.

I was walking back to my office when somebody behind me called my name. I wasn’t familiar enough with her voice to recognize it yet. Jane Sykes.

“Mind some company?”

“Be my guest.”

“You sound kind of mad.”

“Confused more than mad.”

“I really did lay it on pretty heavy.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“I’m just protecting you and protecting me.”

“More you than me.”

“Stated just like a lawyer.”

We were across the street from the town square. Kids splashing in the wading pool, retirees playing checkers and throwing horseshoes, teenage boys aching for the teenage girls they saw passing by. As much as I wanted to be an adult, I had flashbacks to when the mode of transportation was a Schwinn and you could find a girl who’d ride on your handlebars as you pretended to be in complete control of the bike that was about to go careening into a tree. Memory is a lie, but not a complete lie.

Two decades of cars crawled down the crowded street. I loved the prewar coupes, the preferred cars for pulp cover gangsters riding on the running boards with their guns blazing; the big unapologetic Packards that announced to one and all that even if you didn’t own the entire world, you owned a damn good share of it; and the 1955 Chevrolets, the most radical departure from the accepted look in automobile history. The languid dusty sunlight on them all gave them a feel of being trapped inside a museum.

“So why don’t you buy me dinner tonight, see how it goes?”

“I dunno, Jane.”

“Oh, God.”

“What?”

“I run hot and cold and now you run hot and cold?”

“How about I call you later?”

“All right. But I’ll be at Cliff’s most of the afternoon. I’ve asked him to bring Rob Anderson in. Or haven’t you heard about the tar baby?”

“Yeah, apparently the whole town has.”

She broke into long strides that pulled her far away from me in less than a minute. In less than forty-eight hours I’d gone through love at first sight, fear, embarrassment, wanton sexual need, and rage with her. Sounded like the basis for a promising relationship.

By 6:45 all but one of my blackmail subjects had shown up and taken a manila envelope. Two of them tried to disguise themselves in slouch hats and heavy coats. In this kind of weather they looked suspicious as hell.

But it was a happy time for them and they thanked me.

The senator hadn’t shown up yet. Given how eager he’d been the morning he’d worn his own disguise, I was surprised he chose to be late.

I kept watching the office door. I also kept watching the office phone. I thought maybe Jane Sykes would decide to call me, since I’d decided not to call her.

I didn’t waste time, though. I had plenty of paperwork to shuffle through and I kept busy right up until 7:20. The senator was now thirty-five minutes late.

I went down the hall to the john, washed up, and combed my hair. Somehow a Swanson TV dinner didn’t sound so good. I decided I’d go to the steak house out on the highway.

I’d left my office door open. I’d also left the lights on. Now the lights were off. This would have alarmed me more if the electrical wiring in this building hadn’t been done by Ben Franklin himself.

The first thing was to get to the fuses Jamie kept in her desk. I was two steps across the threshold when someone moved from the shadows and smashed something hard across the side of my head.

It wasn’t a clean knockout. It wasn’t even a clean knockdown. What it was was a whole lot of pain and confusion on my part. On their part it was not just one but two more applications of something hard against the side of my head.

They got their clean knockdown and their clean knockout.

Now you know and I know what they were after. There was absolutely no other reason to come after me the way they had. They didn’t find it, because I had put the envelope back in the wall safe before I went to the john. The only person I was sure it hadn’t been was the good senator himself. All he would have had to do was ask when he showed up for his appointment.

I went down the hall and got a good look at the lump on the side of my head. Ugly, but not bleeding. I leaned into the bathroom mirror to check my eyes. They looked normal, though I wasn’t sure what I was looking for exactly.

I returned to my office, sat behind my desk, took out a pint of Jim Beam, and had a nice self-indulgent shot. Two shots, in fact. Jamie had left part of a can of Pepsi. I used the rest of it to gulp down two aspirins.